ArbitraryValue

I would have been spiteful enough to return my new laptop (despite needing it for a trip I had in a couple of days) if I wasn't able to bypass the account requirement by disabling the wifi.

Is this a "forced out by Trump" resignation, a "forced out by the university" resignation, or a "protest against capitulation" resignation?

People are openly selling AI art?

49.8%, but 50.8% of those voters who didn't lodge a protest vote. I have more respect for the protestors than for the people who didn't vote at all (they literally don't count for anything) but the protesters still had something to do on election day which they thought was more important than helping determine who would be the next President.

As for his policies polling negatively: I don't care, unless they're policies that he didn't campaign on. (And even in that case, the voters still chose the dangerously unpredictable candidate.) Frankly, I have more respect for those Republicans who are happy with what's going on than for the ones experiencing buyer's remorse. At least they're good at being bad, rather than grossly negligent.

With that said, I do think it's funny that if only about 0.8% of the voters had chosen otherwise then my assessment of the American national character would be dramatically different. I admit that I'm not entirely rational about this.

The thing is, Trump is the legitimate ruler (I won't say leader) of the USA. He didn't conceal his cruelty, his ignorance, and his plans for the country. Most Americans who cared enough to express their opinion asked for that cruelty and ignorance, and the chaos we're seeing now is simply democracy in action.

(Trump is attacking that democracy, but that's also something the majority asked for. Why should the USA's former democratic values be imposed on a people that rejects them?)

I take whatever part of the responsibility remains after all the blame is removed.

He's exercising (or attempting to exercise) much more executive power than prior Presidents. Even if he has dementia (and I doubt he does) then whoever gives him papers to sign clearly has no intent to minimize the amount of damage he could do.

Having $2,000 is better than having $2, but in practice I'm usually skeptical that plans to achieve an outcome like that will work out rather than failing and leaving both of us with $1. The manner in which the outcome would be achieved also matters - some of the plans seem to me like proposals to just steal the money and I object to that on moral rather than economic principles.

(I don't mean to imply that people I disagree with think that stealing is OK, but rather that they and I don't agree on the definition of stealing.)

I'm not one of those few completely uncompromising libertarians who don't want public roads - I actually think the government should be doing all the things you list, and I pay my taxes. I do prefer individualistic ways of doing things, but I'm pragmatic and there are many problems for which the collectivist solution is the only practical solution. When I say I'm fiscally conservative, I mean that I think society should be more libertarian than it is now, not that it should be absolutely libertarian.

I'm someone who actually calls myself socially liberal but fiscally conservative, and that's because my primary concern (in the terms of moral foundations theory) is the liberty/oppression axis. In other words, I think leaving people alone is a good thing, and while it's not the only good thing and it needs to be balanced against other concerns, we should still be doing it more than we are now.

Two caveats:

1. I'm socially liberal because a free society requires tolerating even the people you hate. This is hard, and even many people who consider themselves tolerant because they simply don't hate a particular group aren't (and often don't want to be) tolerant in this sense.

2. I'm economically conservative because the freedom to act without government interference even in an economic context has great inherent worth (but I'll repeat here that I don't value it to the exclusion of all else) but also because the free market usually does a better job than central planning at making everyone prosperous. I don't care much about wealth inequality - a world in which I have two dollars and you have two million dollars is a better place than a world in which we both have just one dollar.

Edit: in practice I always end up voting for moderate Democrats at the national level, both because I think social issues are generally more important than economic issues and because neither party usually does what I would want regarding economic issues. However, I have more options at the state and local level.

Texting would be so impersonal. The polite way to do things is to accidentally hand over the documents in person.

Criticism from Democrats is not going to have any effect.